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So this is Awful Emblem. To make a long story short, I ran a thread over on SA showcasing a bunch of FE romhacks (ranging from excellent to...whatever the hell Ostian Princess is supposed to be), a bunch of stupid ideas were thrown around and eventually we decided to take a crack at making one ourselves. I mean, we can't do any worse than Mig64 there did.

Anyway, that was 16 months ago and now we have a shiny new Act 1 demo to show off, which you can get right here.

The story follows a young girl named Judith, who serves as the leader of the local militia. After her village is attacked by bandits, she goes to petition the local lord for aid and gets swept up in an assassination plot. The base gameplay is more or less unchanged, although we've done a bunch of small changes in tweaking weapon weights, removing the female mounted con/rescue penalty, some new weapons, a bunch of new spells (although only two(?) of them are in the Act 1 demo) and a lot of little quality of life stuff like that.

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Oh and I just want to briefly put out an apology to whoever LP'd our hack at FEE3, the version you were playing (1.02) has a rather unfortunate bug that involves the AI fucking up. We were trying to patch a bug related to some cavaliers in Chapter 9, and as it turns out the fix that we came up with made it so that every single unit with the Guard AI acted like AttackInRange instead. So if you were wondering why the bosses and shit were moving in the FEE3 video, the answer is that they're very much not supposed to and we didn't find it until the day before FEE3.

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Oh and I just want to briefly put out an apology to whoever LP'd our hack at FEE3, the version you were playing (1.02) has a rather unfortunate bug that involves the AI fucking up. We were trying to patch a bug related to some cavaliers in Chapter 9, and as it turns out the fix that we came up with made it so that every single unit with the Guard AI acted like AttackInRange instead. So if you were wondering why the bosses and shit were moving in the FEE3 video, the answer is that they're very much not supposed to and we didn't find it until the day before FEE3.

(It is fixed for 1.03 for the record)

Oh, it's all good sans my shitty ass luck of course >_>, I planned to restart and do a formal run through at a later date anyway(idk if I'd LP, maybe since i have my better mic now)

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Never once did we think of Judith's uppercut as a shoryuken but I guess we'd better start calling it that seeing as it has been referred to as such no less than three times by now. I will now penalize any team member who does not refer to it as such without an appropriate level of enthusiasm.

Sometimes an uppercut is just an uppercut but this time there's also an axe involved

Edited September 1, 2014 by FPzero

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I played through the demo on Normal mode and it's pretty great! Maps are nice, the script is concise and reads well, I had a lot of fun with it it general. More specific thoughts under the spoiler for length and also for being spoilers:

[spoiler=Thoughts]-Prologue is pretty simple even on Hard Mode; the generics enjoy suiciding on Niccolo, probably because they have WTD against Judith. Not much to it, but it's very short anyway so w/e. I let Niccolo take the bosskill since he gets 40 XP from it.

Chapter 1:

-The eastern brigand arrives hilariously late on Normal; only reaching the village on turn 5 enemy phase is pretty bad when there's like one Soldier between you and the village. He could stand to be on the map from the start. Played through the chapter on Hard mode later, and it's a lot tougher on that mode, so props to whoever designed that.

-The other reinforcements (on both modes) are pretty inconsequential and basically free experience; on Normal it's easy to have almost routed the map by the time the Fighter appears, and on Hard you're obliged to rush to save the village, so they're also not a big factor when they arrive.

-The last group of enemies+boss are a simple bait and switch job - making them all aggro together could be cool.

-The nighttime palette with rain looks very nice.

Chapter 2 and 3:

-Nice, fun chapters. The enemy units are a little weak offensively considering how many units are at your disposal, but nothing big. The first few turns of chapter 3 are the most intense; I had June/Martin/Clover/Rowan managing the middle, and Rose/Ferris dealing with the east. After you clear out the initial glut of enemies, it's pretty easy to head on over and kill the boss - the reinforcements there were pretty much dropping on my head. My units weren't blessed in anything at this point either; I think the chapter could use a slightly stricter time limit, or have the reinforcements arrive earlier.

-The Myrm/Archer take a while to break their wall; by the time they're finished you should have cleared out the rest of the enemies so they aren't a real threat.

-Giving out a Rescue staff is neat; most FEs don't let you have one until really late, so being able to play around with one early on is fun for making your options more open, and gives Niccolo another cool thing to do.

Chapter 4:

-The Fighter/Merc in the north just stop when you save the village; if I had to guess I'd say that they're using 0x04 as their second AI byte, which tells them to flee the map when there's nothing left to loot. Since they aren't Thieves nor Brigands and the map has no escape points defined, they sit still when you save the village. AI byte 2 0x05 tells them to not bother fleeing after the map's over, which should work out better for them.

-The reinforcements arrive way late in this map; the southeast guys arrived when I was almost finished up with the boss's group, and when I had almost dealt with them some guys started spawning from the forts. They just extend the length of the chapter if you don't rout super fast the way it is now. I liked how the chapter played otherwise though.

Chapter 5:

-The northwest Archer is aggressive from the start, so it's pretty easy for Victoria to rescue-drop Judith over the mountains, and pick off the village on Turn 3. Not a bad thing per se, but it does mean that the reinforcements in the northwest don't matter much. I managed to clear the chapter in seven turns for reference; could have done better if I was willing to take more risks.

Chapter 6:-Lots of "Attack in Range" enemies here, and they aren't much on offense, so advancing quickly here isn't very hard imo. It is Normal mode though, so it's not an OUTRAGE or anything. I sent everybody (except Ferris - and thank you for giving armors 5 Move) to the right throne door, and it was pretty easy to clear out the throne room.

-Perhaps for Hard mode you could make all of the enemies in there start chasing you when one of the doors open - it would make splitting your forces between the east and west paths to break up the enemies a good idea.

-Cedric's avoid was high enough to be annoying, but you have the Sagaris, Halberd and Horseslayer which can all get WTA on him, so it shouldn't take too long to bring him down with a bit of luck.

Chapter 7:

-Not a whole lot of enemies here, and they tend to go after the green units too, so it's a pretty leisurely chapter. Longsword Cavalier prioritizes the NPC Fighter, but even if he doesn't the Longsword is only 10 effective MT against a lance and he weighs himself down with it, so he's not a big deal. My Victoria was able to double the Peg Knights and handle them by herself too.

I will admit that I had this...thing on my team:

Which might have skewed my views on later chapters' pacing.

-The Mage/Shaman reinforcement from the fort is not a problem; they spawned right in the middle of my units so they were free XP pretty much. The Peg reinforcements were rather better timed, I had to take them into account when I was going after the boss.

-Malorie is legitimately threatening, but Ferris can safely lure out the Short Spear, and from there it's not too difficult to bring her down on the next turn. It's a bit strange the Javelin Cavs don't seem to move - I thought they'd charge with the boss, but thankfully they don't.

Chapter 8:

-Pretty tough chapter actually, even with God June around. There's a lot to do if you want to push up quickly, and the big groups of reinforcements encourage you to do so. I ended up killing Strickland the turn after I lured him out (turn 8 maybe?), because a whole bunch of reinforcements had just appeared all around my units. Very fun and well-designed map I think.

Chapter 9:

-Pretty short, and not as hard as Chapter 8 really. Decently large groups of enemies in the west, but nothing too difficult; the reinforcements are notable but not too much to handle. No idea what's up with the Myrmidon in the northwest corner, she never budged from her spot.

-Between Martin and June, it's probably possible to kill Jake before he escapes. Not sure what would happen if you did.

-Cassandra was pretty tough to beat; she's tanky and quite dodgy on the throne which makes outpacing her healing a little dicey, although she isn't a big threat to your units if you know what you're doing. The Axereaver and Fia's magic put up good numbers against her though. It wouldn't hurt to make her a little less tanky and a little more powerful, I'd say.

The Team:

[spoiler=Units]

Her first few levels were horrendous (Hp,Skl/Luck,Skl/Luck) but she picked up after that and stayed useful the whole time. Her high Skill came in handy for blicking Cavaliers, and I believe she was my only physical unit who could one-round Knights, which was cool.

Niccolo starts great and kept on being great the whole time. Getting some of the early boss kills netted him a Speed proc, which let him double several enemies he wouldn't have otherwise. Most of his other levels came from staff usage, and I think he did pretty well off of that. Enemies had a bad habit of suiciding onto him early on, but later he was good for weakening enemies for others to take the kill.

Invaluable as an early healer, and the Rescue staff let him pull off some other neat tricks (bringing Kate to the throne room in C6 fast, letting Judith recruit Paula quickly in Chapter 8, etc. He could probably stand to have his Def/Res bases toned down and his HP growth buffed - he doesn't have to be very tanky early on to play his role.

I feel like I got unlucky with her levels, but she was still useful for Longbow chip and killing Mages.

Very good unit. She's pretty fragile, but her avoid and great offense make up for that. There were some enemies only she could double, which was good for her.

He didn't get a lot of stats, but he did get lots of Speed, so he was useful for tanking hits and hitting back hard.

And then, there's June:

Absolutely crazy level ups, she was great at just rushing forward and mauling 3-4 guys on enemy phase. When I recruited Martin I just benched him immediately, as there was no way he could hope to match her. Almost ever level of hers looked like this:

Geez that's some essay I've just written. Anyway this was a pretty cool hack, I'm looking forward to more as you may be able to discern.

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Glad you enjoyed it! From the way you're describing the chapters, I can tell that you're a really aggressive and fast player, which is fine! I'm the same way and personally I think normal mode is a bit too easy (which is why I'm doing silly shit with Hard mode), but that's the point. Normal mode isn't meant to be super hard, and we tried to find a nice balance where pretty much anyone could finish it if they were willing to work at it. I mean, at one point we did a race among some of the team members and one of them got a game over in Chapter 3 because they left the throne totally undefended. So if it seems a bit easy, it's because we figured it was better to err on the easy side than to have people complain that it's too hard. Chapter 3 alone has been toned down like two or three times now.

Now, that said:

- I'm glad you liked Chapter 1 Hard, that was probably my favorite thing to design (of the few that I've done so far, anyway).

- We agreed about the Rescue staff, and to be honest, it was partially inspired by Awakening giving you one early. Since your Jeigan's a bishop anyway, we figured that it's better to give more options and let you have some fun with that kinda stuff.

- The Javelin Cavs in Chapter 7 do actually move! It's on a turn timer and I asked the same question when I did a run of that myself. FP was very confused when I asked why the boss moved and the cavs didn't until he said "Holy shit, you got down there that fast?"

- Holy shit you had a bad Willow. Great June though, I had a very similar one on my last run, except she was like 12/12/15. Yeah.

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Wow, that's a lot of useful feedback Vennobennu. I know Artix just posted but here are my thoughts on the difficulty curve.

The funny thing is that even though we're making a romhack, about a third of our team are probably what you'd consider "average" players, myself included. We aren't super-good at these games but we enjoy them anyways so we wanted to balance the game so that we made something we'll also enjoy. Therefore the difficulty for Normal mode is probably along the lines of FE6 Normal without asshole reinforcements. Sometimes bosses won't move or be that threatening, like in Chapter 1. Same for reinforcements. It's also worth noting that I'm the one doing the events for the game and I play them much slower and methodical than some of the other team members. For better or for worse, reinforcements are generally balanced around when I'd get somewhere, though I do try to take into account how fast the other team members might get somewhere. They keep surprising me about how fast they finish the chapters though. Someone beat chapter 7 on turn 6 and I just threw my hands up in the air saying "I can't account for this." Now, Hard mode is Artix's playground and you can expect no mercy because he's kind of evil (but fair) with these things. All that being said, we'll still take your thoughts on difficulty into account. We're due to revamp and rebalance act 1 soon enough.

I think we may have to tone down June's bases because goddamn she just continuously blows everyone else out of the water. Had you gotten a good Willow (she has a 40% strength growth and 45% speed growth and you proc'd it twice/once respectively in 8 levels), the two of them could have just ruined everything.

Thanks for the tip on chapter 4's AI. We'd wondered about fixing it but with so little documentation on AI we figured what we had was a "good enough" solution. We'll give that a try when we do our revamps.

It's funny seeing your Niccolo with so many levels since most of us tend to not actively use him. At the same time he has a little potential in that he's useful for a straight 12 damage on anything in the early game and his growths are nowhere near traditional jeigan growths. He'll probably never reach the endgame but he does have a combined total of 275%. It's hard to balance a magic-using jeigan which is why his bases are so awful.

I'm glad you had fun with it. We're having fun making it and will post occasional updates I'm sure.

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I'm still amazed people can get to him through two doors and enemies. Considering the amount of times we've tried to change that event so that he is unreachable, nevermind killable, I think I might just have to remove the door leading into that room because this is getting ridiculous.

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Oh yeah, I'm not saying "You MUST make this hardcore" or whatever, Normal mode is pretty good where it is. Mostly I was posting my impressions of the chapters as I played them. June has solid bases at a low level and very good growths all around, plus two weapon types so she's usually on the good side of the weapon triangle. Niccolo's great in Normal even without good levels, but on Hard I'd imagine he'll be reliant on Speed procs to stay competitive.

Recently, there's been an effort to document what all the AI codes actually mean; there's a lot of neat stuff you can do with AI that we didn't know about before. Oh and I typoed about the village-looting behaviour; you'd want to change AI byte 2 to 0x04 if it was 0x05 (if it's already 0x04, then, well, all I can suggest would be a CHAI off of an AFEV of the event ID of the village).

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I'm just continually amazed at the number of people that don't immediately look at the convoluted series of moves that would be required to get to Jack and think to themselves "I'm probably not supposed to interact with him."

Live and learn.

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You should keep Jack's situation as it is, but put some kind of easter egg if he is killed. Like that SRW game where the endgame bosses showed up in a mid-game escape chapter and broke the fourth wall if you killed them instead of fleeing.